Restoring Environmental Rules Rolled Back by Trump Could Take Years

WASHINGTON — President Biden, vowing to restore environmental protections frayed over the past four years, has ordered the review of more than 100 rules and regulations on air, water, public lands, endangered species and climate change that were weakened or rolled back by his predecessor.

But legal experts warn that it could take two to three years — and in some cases, most of Mr. Biden’s term — to put many of the old rules back in place.

“People should temper their expectations about what can be done quickly,” said Kevin Minoli, who served as a lawyer at the Environmental Protection Agency in the Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump administrations. He added, “It’s very possible, more possible than not, that some of the Trump rules will still be in effect for a couple of years.”

Mr. Biden has an array of legal tools to reinstate environmental protections that were dismantled by the Trump administration. Gina McCarthy, his top domestic climate change adviser, headed the E.P.A. in the Obama administration and served as the chief author of some of the nation’s most comprehensive climate change rules. She has now reviewed every possible option to restore those protections, according to a White House official who is familiar with her thinking but was not authorized to speak on the record.

But those tools take time. Experts in environmental law who have spoken with top Biden administration officials said the process of rolling back the Trump-era rollbacks would quite likely fall into a few broad categories. In a limited set of cases, Mr. Biden will be able to use his executive authority immediately, for instance to cancel individual fossil fuel infrastructure projects or reinstate federal protections on distinct areas of land and water. He did that on day one when he rescinded the construction permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have carried oil from Canadian oil sands across the American Midwest. ...